Yesterday I went to walk among the trees and I felt sad. I felt sad for the Este Mvskokvlke (Muscogee/Creek) people who used to live here before they were forced to move. And then I was on reddit and reminded of my favorite friendship in all of history (that I know of)!:
The Choctaw and the Irish. Tune in for History Time! with Tara!
In 1847, the Choctaw tribe, having experienced extreme suffering at the hands of English colonists, and having just been forcefully relocated from their sacred lands to what is now Oklahoma, heard of another group of people who were also oppressed and hungry.
Since 1169, Ireland had been under a foreign force that didn’t officially end until 1949, when Ireland became a Republic. Northern Ireland (where my family lives and has for centuries) is still technically under British rule.
Over 150 years ago, that colonial force actively took food from Ireland to the point that the Irish people suffered one of the worst famines in history - The Irish Potato Famine, also called The Great Hunger—a period of mass starvation and disease that lasted from 1845 to 1852. Some don’t consider it a famine at all and instead call it a calculated genocide by English occupiers. During those years, Britain exported out of Ireland approximately £500,000 of government-produced food. It had been British policy to constrain the Irish to tiny plots of barren land suitable only for little growth. When famine hit, the Irish would starve. It was an inevitability brought on by nature but predetermined by acts of man.
Within such an environment, the Irish had few friends. And somehow over 4,000 miles away, the news of the ruin in Ireland had reached the people of the Choctaw Nation. The Choctaw were also intimately aware of how society crumbles in the face of tyrannical governance, and in the Irish, they saw shadows of their own past.
And they were right in that comparison because the English had used many of the same tactics of colonization against the Irish that they later did against Indigenous peoples on this land, including where I currently reside and probably you, too.
Both the Irish and the Choctaw Nation had histories of the English pushing them off their lands and away from their traditional food sources; starving them by withholding other foods, while also extracting foods and profits from their lands; forcibly 'schooling' their children, and beating their languages and cultures out of them (literally)— Northern Ireland is struggling to pass the Irish Language Act in an attempt preserve the endangered language. Oh and don’t forget that the English were aided and abetted in these efforts by a church that purported to care, while sharing in the exploitation to increase their own wealth...
Only fifteen years before the Great Hunger, the Choctaw had been the victims of a forced march from their homelands, a deplorable exodus we know as the Trail of Tears. Choctaw land was systematically obtained through treaties, legislation, and threats of warfare. Ultimately, the Choctaw and the United States agreed to nine treaties each one more and more in favor of the US. The Choctaw were eventually classified by European Americans as one of the "Five Civilized Tribes" —(The term has been criticized for its ethnocentric definition of civilization, the population currently living in Oklahoma are referred to as the Five Tribes of Oklahoma)— because they adopted numerous practices of their new neighbors (see: Assimilation/ Residential Schools).
Like many indigenous tribes, the Choctaws considered European laws and diplomacy confusing. Choctaw history, as with many Native Americans, was passed orally from generation to generation. The US required treaties to be written and signed.
Beginning in 1831, the Choctaw were the first Native American tribe forced to relocate under the Indian Removal Act. About 2,500 died on the journey to their new home.
The long march from Mississippi to Oklahoma had understandably made the Choctaw sensitive to the anguish of those desperately in need, and when just 15 years later, news arrived of what was happening in Ireland, a group of concerned tribal members rallied together to raise funds for those Irish still clinging on to life.
“We helped the Irish because that’s who we are and what we are,” explains tribal council speaker, Delton Cox, “we remembered the sorrow to befall our people, and we felt the same for the people in Ireland. $170 might not seem like much, we were poor, yet each of us eagerly gave to help our brothers and sisters.”
In 1847, the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma sent $170 to Ireland during the Great Famine. The Choctaw, poor, broken, and tired from war, gave the Irish all they had to help people they never met to keep them from suffering the way they were.
More than 170 years later, Ireland has returned the favor, raising over $2 million for the Navajo and Hopi nations, which had been hard hit by the coronavirus pandemic.
Today the Navajo Nation reported 0 Covid-19 related deaths for the 8th day in a row!
I want to clarify in case any white people are going to try to say that the Irish were enslaved: No.
There’s no doubting that the Irish have faced a lot of oppression throughout history, but it absolutely CANNOT be equated with the realities of chattel slavery, or even Black Codes and Jim Crow laws further down the line. If you were white and indentured, you could work to pay off your debts, and your children were not considered the property of your employer (owner). Period.